ATREYU

With Lead Sails Paper Anchor, the O.C. outlaws have made a career-defining album—one that just might kill metalcore dead.

By Dan Epstein
Photos by travis Shinn

Dan Jacobs seriously thought he was going to die. Just six days earlier, Atreyu’s fireplug lead guitarist had arrived on the beautiful island of Koh Samui, off the coast of Thailand, with Atreyu vocalist Alex Varkatzas. The original plan was for the pair to celebrate the completion of their band’s new album, Lead Sails Paper Anchor (Hollywood), with three weeks of relaxation, lobster dinners, and Muay Thai kickboxing instruction; but now, Dan was lying in the local hospital, his hand hooked up to an IV, as a team of Thai doctors frantically tried to diagnose what was wrong with him.

“We’d done Muay Thai training for five days straight, and everything was great,” Jacobs remembers. “On Sundays, there’s no training, so our trainers were like, ‘Hey, if you guys want, we’ll take you around the island.’ We get in the back of this truck, and they take us into the jungle, where we go riding elephants and see all these temples and mummified monks, all this crazy shit. As soon as we get back to the hotel, I start feeling weird—kind of hot and tired, and my stomach’s hurting. I’m just like, ‘Uh, I’m just not gonna go to dinner. I’m gonna go lay down and chill.’ By the time everyone gets back from dinner, I’m shivering, I’ve got a fever, and I’m just dripping sweat everywhere.”

Unable to sleep through the night, Jacobs decided to go to the hospital, figuring he was probably dealing with nothing worse than a bad case of food poisoning. “I’m pretty confident, like, ‘Just give me some pills, and I’ll knock it,’” he recalls. “But they take my temperature and my blood pressure, and they’re like, ‘Your temperature is 104 right now, and your blood pressure is really low. You’re not going anywhere—we’re keeping you here overnight!’ They’re like, ‘It could be typhoid fever, it could be malaria, or it could be something that you get from rat piss in the water, that makes you bleed internally…’ I’m like, It could be any of these things? Oh, fuck!

“So they put me on an IV,” he continues, “and they just keep taking my blood over and over again. I peaked at a 106-degree temperature; I was borderline on my deathbed, lying there drenched in sweat. My clothes were so wet, it felt like somebody had dumped a bucket of water on me.”

The doctors’ eventual diagnosis of Jacobs’ illness was typhoid fever, a disease which isn’t uncommon in third world counties, and which is rarely fatal if treated in time—as it was in Jacobs’ case. But for a few agonizing hours while awaiting the results of his many blood tests, the Atreyu guitarist wasn’t entirely sure he was actually going to get out of Thailand alive. And yet, Jacobs felt oddly at peace with the situation; after all, he figured, he’d already had a pretty good run.

“I’ve already pretty much covered all the things that I’ve wanted to do in life,” he says, looking once again like the picture of health as he prepares for a Revolver photo shoot. “I mean, there are some really big things I haven’t done yet, like headlining an arena or stadium tour. But if I died tomorrow, I could be like, ‘Yeah, I did my thing.’ I mean, I’ve had intercourse with a female; I’ve put it in a girl’s bum, and I think that’s, like, the highest point in life that you can get—once you’ve done that, there isn’t really anywhere else to go,” he says with a knowing laugh. “And also, we’ve just made an amazing record. So while I’m really stoked I’m still here, I could probably die now without having too many things left on the checklist.”

Epic, bracingly metallic, yet straight-to-the-bloodstream accessible, the Orange County quintet’s latest full-length release is unquestionably the artistic high point of a career that’s now nearing the decade-long mark. Produced by John Feldmann (the Used, Good Charlotte, Goldfinger), the record’s 11 tracks reveal a band that’s not only willing to take musical risks, but is also eminently capable of pulling it off unscathed. Ferocious tracks like “Doomsday,” “Can’t Happen Here,” and “Becoming The Bull” (the album’s first single) feature what drummer-vocalist Brandon Saller describes as “some of the heaviest music we’ve ever written, by far,” but the merciless riffs and skin-blistering guitar solos are juxtaposed with the most hummable melodies the band has ever recorded.

“It would have been easy for us to put fucking brutal vocals over the music,” Varkatzas explains, “But then we would have made a record that sounds the same as our last, just like a bunch of other bands in our genre.”

“We’ve been doing this for awhile now,” says Jacobs, “And with every record, we’re trying to do something different—just trying to change it up and expand. With this record, it was like, Let’s throw everything out the window that we’ve done before, and come in here fresh. Any ideas that anybody has, let’s try—even if it sounds like a stupid idea.”

One of the most obvious differences between Lead Sails and band’s previous albums (2002’s Suicide Notes and Butterfly Kisses, 2004’s The Curse, and 2006’s A Death-Grip on Yesterday) is in the album’s vocals. In the past, the lines of vocal duty were clearly delineated—Varkatzas screamed the angry, vitriolic passages, while Saller sang the melodic hooks. This time, however, their voices are blended in a way that often makes it difficult to pick out exactly who’s singing (or screaming), plus bassist Marc McKnight also takes a few turns at the microphone, further enriching the record’s vocal blend.

“There’s more melody on this album than before, but we’re not just singing,” explains Saller. “There’s singing, there’s screaming, there’s yelling, there’s talking, you know what I mean?”

“Back in the day, when Phil Anselmo was with Pantera, he had these gnarly pipes, and he could scream, but he could sing as well,” says Varkatzas. “I just want to be able to do everything, and be the complete package, you know? Maybe on the next record I’ll want to sound like Glen Benton from Deicide, but on this record, we wanted to change it up, and have a variety of different sounding songs.”

Jacobs and his fellow guitarist Travis Miguel took a similar approach with their Lead Sails solos. While Jacobs’ affinity for Eighties-style hair metal (see sidebar, page TK) is readily apparent from the first few bars of the opening “Doomsday,” he and Miguel were careful to keep the album from turning into a total shred-fest. “We won’t put solos in every song,” Jacobs explains, “Because we don’t want people to burn out on solos—we want them to be like a treat.

“Before, we would come into the studio with the solos all written out,” he continues. “But on this record, Travis and I would loop the chunk of the song that we were soloing over, and then we’d just sit there and jam on it until we got something; we’d call the engineer back in, like, ‘I’m ready—let’s try this out!’ Everything was pretty much on the fly, you know? But that’s what seemed to work best.”

Varkatzas also took an “on the fly” approach to many of the album’s lyrics, with similar success. “A lot of the stuff that Alex wrote [for Lead Sails] was off the cuff, almost freestyle in a sense,” says Saller. “We’d be like, ‘We need lyrics for this verse,’ and five minutes later he’d have a verse. But at the same time, it’s even better than the stuff he’s come up with in the past.”

“I would go back over everything later, and sometimes I’d change three-quarters of it,” Varkatzas clarifies. “It wasn’t like, ‘That’s it, use it!’ But I just didn’t want to make another record like Suicide Notes, The Curse, or Death-Grip, because all those records are split 50/50 in my mind between songs about random bullshit and songs about relationship things. None of the songs on this record are about anything like that, and the freestyle process really helped me come up with something different.”

“Can’t Happen Here,” one of the album’s standout tracks, finds the band uncharacteristically venturing into political territory, mourning the human toll of the Iraq War while railing against the political corruption and religious zealotry that got our country mired in this tragic mess in the first place. “Does your God know my God?” Saller and Varkatzas wail. “This is how the world will end.”

“We’re not really a political band,” says McKnight. “But the circumstances that have happened since the last record have forced us to be political. It’s forced people like us, who had no political stances and didn’t really care either way, to be extremely active [because we’re] extremely distressed by what’s happening.”

“Basically, I really approve of all these decisions that our country’s making—just kidding!” Varkatzas laughs. “I don’t think we’re getting the whole information of what’s going on, and it’s just kind of a bum-out to me that my children and my children’s children will probably be hated by people of an equally beautiful but different faith, just because of some bullshit that nobody knows about, for which people my age have to go fucking die. And that fucking pisses me off. Our marines are acting like police for a country that wants us there and doesn’t want us there—who fucking knows?

“Those dudes have such a hard job, so the song is not about not supporting them—but I definitely don’t support our fucking president,” the singer continues. “[This war] is not doing anything except just making this big fucking angry circle of everybody hating everybody else. The average Afghani or Iraqi didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, and they’re just as much in the dark about what’s going on as we are over here. What if I came to your house right now, and I was a fucking soldier from another country, and I said, ‘Show me all your guns and let me into your house’ in front of your wife and kids? Or what if people were to come over here and blow up my family or yours, because they don’t like George Bush? How do you get over that, and just forgive and forget? It’s just an insane situation that fucking repeats itself.”

There are still plenty of personal topics on Varkatzas’s mind, however, as indicated by “Doomsday,” a cathartic cry inspired by the death of his beloved grandfather. “It was probably one of the shittiest experiences I’ve ever been through,” he explains. “We were on tour in Baltimore, and I couldn’t go home to say goodbye or do anything about it, and that just fucking sucked. On a scale of one to ten, that was like a minus-fifteen. I don’t really drink, but that day I pounded a little bit of Bacardi, just to feel as bad on the inside as I did on the outside, and I just wanted to go out and get beat up. Not really, but that’s what I kind of felt like. And not like I wanted to fight back—I just wanted to run into someone’s fist.”

Varkatzas thankfully managed to avoid any serious damage, and thus lived to pour the feelings of heartbreak and frustration he experienced that day in Baltimore into “Doomsday.” Though it’s one of the most powerful tracks on Lead Sails, Varkatzas admits that, “It’s hard for me to like that song. I don’t like talking about that shit in interviews. It’s just kind of awkward, because it’s just such an emotional thing.”

Still, the song does tie into another topic that Varkatzas has often talked about at length—his distaste for touring. “I love playing shows, and being with my bros,” he says, “but there’s a lot of things about it that really suck.” The singer explains that “Lead Sails (And a Paper Anchor),” the closing ballad that gives the album its name, is “about being detached from home. Think about a ship with lead sails and a paper anchor—not only does it not work, it doesn’t make sense. And to me, those are the feelings I have about touring. You feel detached, like you don’t have an anchor, and you’re just floating around the world for a couple of months.”

But if the lyrics to “Lead Sails” describe a feeling of confinement and lack of direction, its music—augmented by a slow-building wave of soulful horns and wistful pedal steel guitar—suggests something else entirely. “’Lead Sails’ may mean that you’re not going anywhere,” says McKnight, “But at the same time, a ‘Paper Anchor’ is like nothing’s holding you back. For this record, nothing was holding us back, nothing was stopping us from doing anything we wanted to do.”

“‘Lead Sails’ is a little like ‘The Theft,’” adds Jacobs, referring to the popular ballad from Death-Grip, “But we went even further with it, making it sound like a huge Aerosmith ballad where there’s just so much going on. Everything that could possibly be there is there, instead of just doing guitar, bass, drums, and vocals. It’s kind of a dangerous area for us to be venturing into; it’s like, ‘Horns? I don’t know about that!’ But if a band like Aerosmith or Queen can do it, we can do it too.”

In other words, the five members of Atreyu are more than ready to shed the “metalcore” tag that they’ve been saddled with for years, and Lead Sails could well be the ticket they need to finally escape from the metalcore ghetto. “From Day One, we’ve always wanted to a band that mixed everything up,” says Jacobs. “We don’t want to be one type of music; we want to be all of them. With a title like ‘metalcore,’ it really puts us in a corner. We don’t want to be in a corner; we want to be a metallic rock band, part of a big genre and not a little sub-thing.”

“We never set out to be a metalcore band,” adds Saller. “We’ve always wanted to be that genre-breaking band, where lots of different kinds of people listen to our band. It sucks to just play to metalheads all the time.”

“Whoa!” exclaims Varkatzas, clearly taken aback by his drummer’s assertion.
“You can only go so far just playing to metalheads,” shrugs Saller.

“On a side note, I love playing to metalheads,” says Varkatzas, whispering into Revolver’s tape recorder. “Love it!”

“But you know what I’m saying,” Saller insists. “We’ve never been just about metal.”
Miguel, who has been silent during the interview until now, suddenly weighs in with a skillful combination of authority and diplomacy. “I think, in the whole metalcore genre, if you haven’t made any kind of wave by now, you’re not going to,” the guitarist reasons. “It’s already oversaturated, like the whole nu-metal thing in the late Nineties. It made a wave, and it ran its course, and then everybody got tired of it. I think the whole metalcore thing is following in that same pattern—and we don’t want to be sitting on that ship when it goes down.”

To further extend the nautical analogies, the SS Atreyu is now ready to weigh anchor again after an extended period in dry-dock, and the first stop of its passage will be this summer’s Family Values tour with Korn, Evanescence, Flyleaf, HELLYEAH, and Trivium. “We’ve been home for nine months, which is like the most time we’ve ever been home since we started touring as a band,” says Saller. “We’re so excited to play shows again, but at the same time, it’s like, Oh shit—I haven’t played in nine months!”

This time around, the band plans to fend off the grinding boredom of the road with daily Muay Thai workouts led by Varkatzas, who somehow managed to make it through the entire Koh Samui trip without suffering anything worse than a skin rash. “By the end of this tour, we’re all going to be killers,” laughs Jacobs.

“I’m just trying to lose some pounds,” says Saller, who wants to slim down for his upcoming wedding. “‘Trainer Al’ is gonna help me out! And anyway, doing something like that really keeps the vibe good. If we’re hanging out and doing interactive stuff all day, you’ve got that mindset of being in it together.”

“We’ve always had that gang mentality,” says Varkatzas. “We’re one of the few bands right now that literally came from being a junior high or high school band, and grew into this. Love it or hate it, we came up from the Orange County hardcore scene, and I still have my ethics of the way I like to do things from that—whether it’s right or wrong, sometimes I’d just rather fuck up on my own. As a band, we’ve been willing to take those lumps together, and it builds character. We’re not a band that’s gonna break up tomorrow; we’re going to have at least six-thousand more full-length releases under our belts,” he laughs.

“We’re in this thing for the long haul,” Varkatzas continues. “We’re going to be around for awhile—whether you like it or not.”